The Childhood Homes of 10 Famous Musicians

The legacy of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain is stronger than ever this year, with Kurt Cobain Day established (February 20), the publication of Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, and most recently, the online campaign to purchase Cobain’s childhood home and turn it into a museum (more on that after the jump). We’ve explored the childhood homes of famous authors before, and the time felt right to travel to the early abodes of well-known musicians. Several of these iconic performers got their start at home — in the kitchen where they drank tea every morning and the farmhouse that housed a piano and captured their imagination. Take a peek at these musicians’ humble beginnings, and see how their earliest dwellings influenced their careers.

Kurt Cobain

Last year, Kurt Cobain’s mother put the family’s 1.5-story Aberdeen, Washington home on the market. Cobain’s hometown is where it all started for Nirvana, co-founded with bassist Krist Novoselic. Now, journalist Jaime Dunkle has launched a crowd-funded campaign to purchase the home and transform it into a museum. “It’s not fancy, but it’s real. And that’s how we want the house to remain,” she wrote on the gofundme.com page. Cobain described his home city in a 1994 interview:

Aberdeen, it’s a coastal town about 100 miles away from Seattle. It’s a really small place. A very small community with a lot of people who have very small minds. Basically if you’re not prepared to join the logging industry, you’re going to be beaten up or run out of town. . . . Yeah, I was run out of town. They chased me up to the castle of Aberdeen with torches. Just like the Frankenstein monster. And I got away in a hot air balloon. And I came here to Seattle.